The Dr. Josh Axe Show - 5 Shockingly Simple Steps to Transform Your Child's Mental Health

Episode Date: November 2, 2023

Harness the power of your thoughts to transform your brain. World-renowned neuroscientist, Dr. Caroline Leaf, joins Dr. Josh Axe to discuss her pioneering research on the mind-brain connection. Learn science-backed techniques to reduce anxiety, boost memory, and cultivate mental resilience. You’ll learn: Simple daily habits to rewire your brain  How to make your home a “mental health haven” for kids Responding to warning signs like tantrums  Embracing “messy parenting” to nurture development Join Dr. Josh Axe and Dr. Caroline Leaf in this empowering conversation on taking control of your mental wellbeing through neuroscience. Want more of The Growth Lab with Dr. Josh Axe? Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Follow Dr. Josh Axe Instagram Twitter Facebook Tik-Tok Follow Dr. Caroline Leaf Instagram Twitter Facebook Tik-Tok Follow Leaders Instagram Twitter Facebook Email Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So the big picture is how am I showing up? In other words, what are my emotions in this moment? How am I showing up in life in this moment? With my emotions, what I'm saying and doing, how I'm looking at life and how my body's functioning. Is this a pattern? Is this just a one-off or are there patterns in my life? So we've got to stand back and observe the patterns in our life.

We also can observe the reactions, like if we suddenly found ourselves being very reactive to certain situations. We need to be observant of those. We need to see how we're handing the day-to-day struggles, how we hand, the kinds of habits we've built and then also potentially deep-seated patterns which are indicative of some level of trauma that's occurred at some point in your life. Hey everyone, Dr. Josh Axe here. Welcome to the Growth Lab podcast. I am thrilled to welcome Dr. Caroline Leith, a pioneering neuroscientist who has dedicated her career to understanding

the mind-brain connection. And Dr. Caroline and I go way back. In fact, about 10 to 12 years ago, We did a speaking tour together called the Mind Body Spirit Tour. We're her, her myself and Jordan Rubin went to some different events and venues and spoke about really the mind-body connection and how to heal that connection. I'd have been so blown away by her work. You know, she's a PhD in communication pathology. And she's really worked and spent her career learning how to change the brain and use neuroplasticity in order to help us become the best of. us. And I also am excited to talk to her today about mental health because this is such a big topic for us and our kids. And so many people have questions about mental health today and how

we can not only be physically fit, but mentally fit. Dr. Caroline, thanks so much for coming on the show today. Oh, Josh, it's so great to be with you again and to chat again. And yeah, we go back a long way. We've really done a lot of work over the years. So it's exciting to be joining you on your podcast. Thank you. Yeah, well, I know you've been blowing up. I was just telling you, before we jumped on, I've been so impressed to see you on so many different podcasts, getting the word out about your new book. And I want to kind of start off right there talking about the mental health crisis today because, you know, when I first opened up my functional medicine clinic many years ago, you know, the biggest cases I saw were related to hypothyroidism and autoimmune disease and chronic pain and those sorts of issues. And it used to be any time I looked at the fastest growing health problems, it was cancer and diabetes. and obesity, well today, when you look at the statistics

of the fastest growing health issues, they're related to mental health issues, often depression, anxiety, isolation, extreme guilt, sadness. Talk to me today about why this is such a fast growing issue. That's a really great place to start, Josh. The mental health crisis that we see globally across literally from two and three year olds, four year old, and that sounds crazy.

to say such a young age all the way through to whatever age, adults, and so on, is a symptom of a much larger problem. We talk about the mental health crisis, but that is a symptom of a larger problem, and that larger problem is mind management. We have entered an era over the past 40 years where we've focused so much on the physical that we've forgotten a lot about, well, we've literally put the mind aside, and the mind and brain have been almost either put aside the mind, the component, or otherwise we can look at it as the mind has been subsumed into the physical brain.

And that concept has then led us to look at humans in a very mechanistic way. And if someone is showing a symptom of sadness or a symptom of depression or a symptom of anxiety, they're seeing that as a symptom of a disease. Instead of seeing that as a completely different kind of thing that we're dealing with, so the whole concept of humans and being in life and being affected by life and the impact of life on us in varying degrees has been basically subsumed or reduced down to a symptom of an illness. And that is one of the biggest mistakes that we have made in the last five, 50, almost, yeah, almost 50 years, started around 50 years ago, but really accelerated from the mid-90s

with the advent of brain technology where we could see inside the brain. So instead of that, it's bought tremendous knowledge, but with it has bought a tremendous price that we paid. And that price is this huge problem now of mental health, which is, a symptom of not managing our mind. And I know that's a big concept out there, and I know you've got lots of questions around that, so I can dive a little deeper if you'd like.

Yeah, you know, one of the areas that I have concerns that I think is so important, and I know this as being somebody who's a person of faith, our identity is really important. And we'll read reports today, we'll see this in the news and media today about terms around identity confusion, and that could be around sex or gender.

It could be around a number of things today. Talk to us, about what is identity and what role does that play in mental health? Identity is massive because when we reduce a person's experience, let's say that they've begun through some level of abuse or maybe it's just, they've been on social media too much and they're basically wired in a whole way of thinking in their brain that's influenced how they see themselves. That is attacking a core element of who you are.

So every experience we have is being wired into the psycho-neurobiological network, the mind-brain-body network. and whatever we're wiring into our network through conscious and non-conscious exposure, it's affecting how we as a human function. So that is one aspect of identity being affected. The other aspect of identity being affected is when a person is battling with life and the depression, sadness, anxiety gets labelled as a symptom like I've just described, we remove the person's story and we reduce their massive complex uniqueness down to a label

and labels lock us in. So what's happened, Josh, is that the biomedical model, which is great for medical issues, like physical problems with the brain and the body, is not a good model to apply when it comes to life, life experiences, because you can't just take a symptom of depression as being a sort of the end of the story, that, oh, you have depression because you have a supposed chemical imbalance, that is why you have these symptoms of depression because, and this is this whole circular reasoning, you have depression because you have a chemical imbalance, you have a chemical imbalance, because you have depression.

Neither of those are actually scientific, but that's the languaging that is used today. You take away that person's story. You take away the identity. You invalidate who they are as a person. You lock them into a label. So instead of diagnosing based on symptoms in a very, very non-scientific way, which is what's happening, which people are basically diagnosing instead of describing. So if we take the description of a human's experience away

and we simply diagnose it and label it, we remove the person's, we affect a person's identity, how they see themselves, their experiences. It's invalidating. And that's massive in this whole concept that I mentioned in the first question of mind management. How we see ourselves, how we're managing our mind, which includes identity, is massive.

massively affected by the labels that literally lock us in. Yeah, you know, I remember years ago, Dr. Carolyn, and you've experienced this even more than I have, and I'm certain of this. But I remember having patients come in. I'd give you an example. I had one woman who had fibromyalgia, and it was like almost her entire identity

was wrapped up in fibromyalgia. And so talk to us about how does somebody start to break free? Let's, you know, and I want to give you example of this, too. Like when I was growing up, I was told I had ADHD. And I actually kind of thought, well, I have ADHD. That means I'm not smart. And so I know this is something I even grew up with. I've known, you know, hundreds of people who, and pretty much everybody may have this issue somewhere.

But talk to me about how does somebody break free and start to rewire their brain and create a new identity? That's a really great question. So basically, in the field that I move, the research that I do, we still currently do a lot of clinical trials. We've got a massive study running at the moment. I've published in scientific journals. in the field of psychoneurobiology. Psycho meaning mind, neuro-meaning brain, biology meaning the biology of the, basically the brain and the body. Now that network is what life goes into via the mind.

So our mind is part of this network, but our mind is also how we process life into the network. And everything, every experience from the moment you open your eyes until the moment you go to sleep at night, from birth through death, you are taking life's experiences with your mind and process. them into this network in three places in the mind which is around and all through our body which is basically our life force mind is our life force our ability to be alive to think to feel to choose and for a heart to pump and our brain to work that is what the mind is doing the mind is driving life the mind drives life the mind takes life experiences and puts that into the network in the mind fields of the you have electromagnetic light

field light waves you have auditory sound waves you have gravitational fields you have all these physics concepts, those all encapsulate the physics side of mind, and it's kind of like these waves of energy that flow through. Now we can pick that up with an EEG, with an EKG, with sonograms, so we can pick up that life force with all this technology, which is really interesting. We can also see the result of this life force in just being alive. So the fact that you and I can have a conversation is our energy basically showing up in who we are as a person. So that experience goes into this, is captured by the mind, put into the, into the, into the, into the mind waves, these gravitational fields, also into the brain as changes as basic proteins that

group together to form networks that look like trees, and then also into the body, and this is really something I know you're very familiar with, there are little proteins inside the cells, and those proteins are like little beads that are all strung together, and they wind up into these little microtubors, like a beaded carpet rolled up, if you can visualize that, which is a nice way of doing it, understanding it. So memories, which are our experiences, which cluster together, go into the mind as waves, the energy waves, into the brain as these protein tree-like structures, and into the body, every cell of the body, as these rolled-up little carpets that then drive the way that the DNA

functions. Now, the reason I'm giving you all of that is that life is embodied, mind is embodied. And if we have an experience that is healthy, like this conversation is really good information that's coming in that's going to build healthy wire in a healthy network and that's then going to drive we'll take this hopefully take this information and that then drives how we show up how we apply this in our life in various ways but it could also be a toxic experience so it could be maybe an argument that someone's having with their boss at work or it could be a child being bullied at school or it could be just like we have so many problems with social media currently social it's not

that social media is bad it's how to be managed is the problem so if a child or an adult who's spending hours looking at someone's body image thinking, well, unless I look like that, I have no value. And that's wiring, what they are exposing to is wiring into this triple network. And then that combines in how we show up, in how we feel, in how we behave, what we say and what we do, how we look at life, our perspectives, and also how physically our body functions. And if this is a toxic experience, that network is toxic. It's going to show up. in a toxic way. And if it's continued, it then affects our identity. So what we have to do, and VBR as a human, what we need to do is train ourselves, give ourselves the mental skills that

we have, but we've got to develop them, and you can teach us to children as young as two and three. And I know your child is now, how old is your child now? She's three. That's what I thought. She's three. So she's perfect to start this. It's an ideal age to start teaching them the mental skills to cope with life. And then you can, throughout the rest of our life, we learn these skills. But essentially what we need to do, it's quite simple, is we need to train ourselves and our children how to look at how we are showing up. And I'll explain exactly how to do that. And as you, let me give you the big picture, then we can dive into a little detail.

So the big picture is how am I showing up? In other words, what are my emotions in this moment? How am I showing up in life in this moment with my emotions, what I'm saying and doing, how I'm looking at life and how my body's functioning? Is this a pattern? Is this just a one-off or is there like, are there patterns in my life? So we've got to stand back and observe the patterns in our life. We also can observe the reactions, like if we suddenly found ourselves being very reactive to certain situations, we need to be observant of those.

We need to see how we're handling the day-to-day struggles, how we're handling the kinds of habits we've built, and then also potentially deep-seated patterns, which are indicative of some level of trauma, that's occurred at some point in your life. So the beginning point of rewiring the psychorebio-biological networks, which are the drivers, those gravitational fields, those trees, and those rolled up little protein carpets, those are collectively showing up in our life. And what we want to do is look at the signals that they generate. And then once you can recognize signals, which is really easy, it's not that difficult.

And you can then, you then, the signals will then take you directly to the thought that they come from because all signals are attached to a base and that base is a thought. And a thought is a network of memories in those three different areas. in the brain. So you want to get to the thought and then you want to deconstruct and reconstruct the thought. I love it. That's so good. And so let's dive into deconstructing and reconstructing the thought because I wanted to get, yeah, I did want to mention here. The memories are so important, you know, I one of the things I've talked about fairly recently is I went through a process with myself and I'll call it a memory transplant where I had a teacher tell me that I wasn't smart.

And then later on had a teacher tell me I was smart and a great writer. And I literally kind of had this, oh, this memory, now this isn't true what she said. What this teacher said, this is true. And I decided to focus in and remember and focus in on this memory rather than the other memory. So talk to us about, and I think about this like a diseased organ. If you think about it is, hey, if somebody needs a heart transplant, they need one that's not toxic, one that's functioning. Well, hey, let's got ahead and do a new heart. Well, let's get a new memory in there or a new way of thinking.

Or sometimes maybe it's not a new memory. Maybe it's a new way of perceiving it, right? a new and a new, take a different viewpoint. Exactly. Well, let's take your example and then link it to what the, the way I was describing the different, the way networks form. So you had, you opened up earlier on saying that you were labeled as ADHD. So that's another whole hours long discussion. But in essence, ADHD isn't a disease. The science that says it's something different in your brain causing it isn't actually, it's being disproved. What we see is ADHD is a very real behavior. It's

a set of behavior. it's one of, and behaviors are one of four signals of how we show up. So we can show up with being very frustrated and really back into concentrate and pay attention and sit still in the classroom and, you know, pay attention long enough to be able to learn bits of information. And then that can affect our perspective that they say that, like you said, you thought that you weren't smart. And that can affect your body.

I'm sure that, you know, thinking of school gave you gut take or whatever. So there's, we can, that's just an example. Now, that's memory of that teacher who spoke, that over your life and kind of labeled you and whoever diagnosed and labeled you, that locked you into a certain thing and that's a toxic memory. So that would have gone in your mind part of the network as a very jagged wave, not a nice sign wave, but a jagged wave, something that was disruptive that made you feel an unease because that was, that's been pouring through your entire body. In your, in your brain, it would have looked like a cluster of trees, a thoughts that, like a tree

that's not a healthy looking tree, potentially one that branches are broken and it's kind of ugly and that kind of thing. And the tree is made up of roots and branches as is the wave made up of lots of waves. Those are the memories. So memories make

a thought. So memories are the details. So each word that was said to you by the teacher and potentially by other teachers and by potentially the other kids and by potentially what you heard a doctor or a parent or whatever unintentionally not not realizing they were trying to help you, but you would have clustered all of those memories, those details into those thoughts,

and it would have been a toxic-looking tree. In your body, it would have been those proteins, but instead of it all wound up nicely, it would have started pulling apart. And so now we've got a network that's vulnerable. And we know from the research, you know this very well as well, that chronic unmanaged stress increases vulnerability to disease. And the lifestyle diseases that so many people are dying of so young these days that are prevented, and that's the area that you, your world that you live in,

to try and help people manage these preventable lifestyle diseases. But our mind plays, is the apiary or the fundamental in this process because how we see ourselves shifts. Now, you made a very interesting comment of how another teacher in your life spoke a different story. So you had a different network in your brain, different looking tree, a much healthier looking tree of, oh, actually, maybe you are battling. But you know what, you're really intelligent, Josh, and all the words that she said and all the sort of spin-off from that,

and that would have looked like a healthy wave in your mind, and it would look like a rolled-up carpet. So now you've got two competing networks inside of you, which can create, now depending on your exposure, the nurturing, the education, what people said to you, and you as a person, how you decided to handle that, you obviously did because you very well educated and you've got to the point, but still, as a man of in your late 30s, early 40s,

early 40s, you still are looking back at, this is still something, it's a memory that you bought, a set of memories that you brought up. So definitely made a massive impact on you lifelong. And this is why we want to teach our children from young to be able to recognize that give them the mental skills, that when they're exposed to things that make them feel this confusion in the mind-bram body network, how to process and read those signals and how to have the words to connect to connect with the adults in their lives to be able to try to understand the experiences that they're going through to get some level of truth in order to preserve

identity does that make sense it does make sense and this is something that they don't teach in school this is now i think they should you know bring in your course work and others i think is so important because you know right now it's all about IQ it's not about EQ right having this level of emotional intelligence one aspect of emotional intelligence is self-awareness and others awareness and so So how do people start to foster and how do we teach our kids to start to foster a greater level of self-awareness? And then what do people do with that awareness? Okay, excellent. So it's kind of like flying a plane.

Not that I'm saying everyone's going to learn to fly a plane, but I'm using that example because my husband's actually getting his pilot's license at the moment, just for fun. He wants to learn how to fly. It's his bucket list. So it's very much part of our life. But it's a great way of understanding this process. Okay, so let's think of it. If you, a quick analogy, then we can unpack it. So if we think at the airport, before they fly, any pilot flies, they're going to do a lot of preparation.

The pilot, the co-pilot, the engineer, the tower, is a tremendous amount of preparation. That is the equivalent when it comes to the mind stuff and the body stuff and the brain stuff. That is the equivalent of what I call brain preparation. And those incorporate things like what everyone's familiar with, breathing and meditation, and it could be prayer, it could be visualization, all those things of mindfulness, those things that create a general awareness that calm you down. So it could be things as simple as breathing in for three counts and out for seven. It could be something like think of five things you can see, four things,

you can smell, three things, you can taste, that kind of thing. So it's those kind of decompression preparation activities that align the psychoneurobiological network and help to prepare the neurophysiology for change, for doing this deconstruction, reconstruction, reconstruction, reconceptualization. process, which is what you did with the ADHD. You had these two competing viewpoints and you, as you said yourself, your words were, you had to change your memories. So they were competing and it's obviously been something that's hanging over your life, almost like a black cloud. And as an

adult, you've made the decision to focus on the truth because the evidence in your life is there. So you're able to do that now. Okay, so basically we've got to prepare our brain. So the equivalent of brain, of that is the breathing. Then once and the visualization and those things. Now, once the pilot has done all of that, then the pilot gets ready for takeoff. And takeoff happens. That is a very structured, very organized, very deliberate, very planned and guided process, not a random process. So that equivalent in terms of managing our mind is gathering awareness. And notice the word gathering.

So from general awareness, which happens with your brain preparation, you're going to gathering awareness. Okay, so this is now, now I'm aware of my bodily sensations, emotions, breath, work. I'm calm down, etc. Now I need to focus in on this moment, how I'm functioning in this moment. So I'm going to gather awareness of four signals, the emotions, which I mentioned earlier on our behaviours, what you're saying and doing, your perspective and your bodily sensations. So it's literally identifying four little sentences. And then from there, that is the equivalent of taking off.

Now, if you just prepare and don't do anything else, the plane will never take off. you don't progress in your life. This is what we're seeing with the research, Josh, is that there's so much mindfulness, breathing, meditation, which is really great, but it's become a band-aid. Because it doesn't progress people forward. It's keeping people in that place. Okay, I feel bad, let me do it, but they're not progressing forward.

It also can create a situation of, and you said these words a few moments ago, you're now aware, what do I do with what I'm aware of? So what the research on awareness and mindfulness and mindfulness, and all these things are showing, is that, hey, if you just make a patient or a person, aware of something, but you don't give them a management process, they're going to crash. It's the same thing as the pilot. If that pilot knows how to take off, but not how to fly,

that plane will crash. So you have to be able to know how to fly. So once you've gathered awareness, you then need to go through a process of deep reflection. Now, reflection is very deep. It is like shining a white light through a prism and there's a rainbow on the other side, there's depth to it. There's this Y process of why do I have those emotions? Do I have more emotions? What are they linked to? How are those? emotions linked to my behaviors? What other behaviors? Is there a pattern? Who, what, when, where, why? And then that's coming up in my body. How are those emotions and behaviors manifesting in my body and in the perspective I have towards life? So it's questioning that, being curious in,

and that's part of flying the plane. But if you stop there, you'll also crash. Because now you've got all this, why, now what do I do? So now we have to go into a process of let's now go and find all the associated memories. Let's get down to the root of the truth. Gathered the branches. But now where did it start? What's the source? What's the origin? And now you've got to go deep. And this is where you go into the second phase of flying, which is called the right or visualization or enactment stage, where you capture the information, not in a journal, in a line. You can do that later. But at this point, you want to just do a brain, mind, body dump onto paper, where you just write down as preferably all over the paper, preferably not in lines, preferably in little bubbles and shapes and arrows and drawings. And that drags, that forces the two sides of the brain to work. together and opens up tremendous insight and helps you to see into an unconscious mind. So it's not going down to the root of the tree. Then you're still flying. If you stop there, you still haven't gone far enough. You could also crash. So you have to, there's another phase of flying and that

next phase of flying is to recheck. And that is, okay, so now I've got all the stuff. I've gathered awareness. I've reflected and I've written all these gathering and reflections down and I've got all this stuff popping up out of nowhere. What does this mean? What are the patterns, triggers, the antidotes, this has happened, what can I do? What is the, and the reconceptualization starts to happen, which is, so at this point we've been deconstructing down to the root system where we can see, okay, I'm doing this because of, I'm showing up like this, there's the pattern, there's the link, there's the association, you're starting to see that, okay, this is what's happened, now what can I do about it? A lot of acceptance happens at this point where you can't, that person who's bullying you,

you can't stop them bullying you, you have to learn how to protect yourself because how they're showing up It's because of their issues and that person who hurt you, you're never going to understand why they did unless you maybe do have a chance to connect with them and communicate. But most of the time, that won't happen. So in other words, this is life. Life is full with these struggles. This is why I'm showing up. It's not something wrong with me. I don't have a diseased brain or a chemical imbalance.

I'm just a human in life experiencing an adverse circumstance. Therefore, this is what it is. There's a reason. And that restores your identity that we spoke about and so on. That's the flying. Then you've got to land a plane. If you don't land the plane, all of that work you've done until now can crash. And that's what I call the active reach.

And that is, okay, what am I going to physically do now? What am I going to say? What's my statement? What's my action? That is going to complete the cycle. And so that's basically what I've just described, Josh, is how you deconstruct and reconstruct through a process that I developed over 38 years ago that it has had 38 years of research. I still do research on it.

We've got a huge study running at the moment. We've just published, we've got six papers. published this year, being published this year alone, submitted and published on this concept. I have an app with all this stuff. In other words, this is not just something I've sucked out of thin air. It's not a new therapy technique. It is a system on how you can find what's driving you. Use whatever techniques you want, CBT, ACTT, whatever you want.

But if you put it into that system, you're then going to fly the plane and land it without, otherwise you're just going to keep crashing, and that's what's happening with people. Dr. Caroline, walk me through one more time. Sort of the high-level bullet points of this self-awareness and then creating the solution to take off and land the plane. Absolutely. So the five steps are together with to break. First of all, you prepare the brain. That's not a step. That's a preparation, brain prep. That's breathing, meditation, etc. Then you're going to gather awareness. Then you're going to reflect. Then you're going to write, act, visualize. Because sometimes maybe you're driving in the car and you can't have a piece of paper. A young child can't get right. So you'd visualize or enact. and then you recheck and then you active reach. So it's a system that your mind-brain body network goes through as it engages with information.

So how does information, how does this conversation get from our mouth into the viewers and listeners heads through this five-step process? So what I've done is I've made a scientific process that we're going through at very fast speeds. I've made it very conscious and deliberate. And by you consciously and deliberately applying that system and then using taking the basic guidance of how each step works and then putting your own what works for you within that then you basically are driving rewiring you deconstructing and reconstructing a network so whatever's

happened to you doesn't go away nothing goes away once it's happened it's there forever but you can change what it looks like you can roll up the carpet again in the body you can change the tree from an unhealthy by cleaning up the roots to a healthy tree where the branch that's toxic will then shrink to a point where you remember, but it's no longer controlling you. You can change the gravitational fields in your mind. That's the work that we do, and that takes time. And that's the other key thing, Josh, we live in a world as we know that everyone, I feel bad, give me a pull.

Make the pain go away. And that is not, when it comes to the body, it works more effectively. When it comes to the mind, that does not work. There isn't a pull that will take it away. Yes, maybe an antidepressant, which is not really an antidepressant, it's just numbing the brain. Maybe we'll numb the brain for a period of time, but it's not fixing the problem.

We have to feel the pain. We have to go through the process. The hard work is the good work. And it takes time. Time thing we should talk about as well, because that's very relevant. Yeah, I want to talk about that next. I want to walk through, though,

so everybody can really grasp because what you're saying here, I think, is so, it's so transformative. And I've read your books over the years, several of them. I've applied this to my own life. So I want to walk everybody through this. And tell me if I miss something here. But one of the first steps is bring into awareness, the feeling you have and the memory you have.

So again, for myself, I might have been told I wasn't worthy, I wasn't good enough, I wasn't smart tied to something like ADHD. So I bring that to awareness. I kind of re-walk through that memory. And I realize this is something that's really impacting my life. And so there's a level of awareness around it. And then one of the next steps there is having, realizing how it's affecting me and all of the sort of going through, hey, is this,

true or is it not true? How's it impacting my life in a negative way and really realizing, oh, this is, this is toxic, this is an issue. And one of the next steps from there is spending some time, you know, thinking through it, but also maybe writing it down, doing kind of a mind map. Get out a piece of paper, get a computer, don't write it in a linear fashion, kind of just throw it all over paper and write down, you know what? This makes me feel like I'm not worthy. This teacher, you know, did this to a lot of students. She was very negative in that way. Another teacher told me I actually am smart. You know what? I realized that I just wasn't trying, right? So I'm kind of throwing all these ideas and thoughts on paper. And then from there, I'm going to take sort of maybe

the limiting belief or this toxic belief and recognize, okay, this is toxic. And it's actually not true. It's not my true identity who I am, this ADHD or I'm not smart. The reality is I'm actually very good at, I'm not good at math. I'm good at science. I'm good at writing. I'm good at this, God's given me these skills here, and I'm going to focus on these things and how am I going to deal with this? Well, maybe I'm going to go back and tell my teacher at some point, hey, I want to let you know that you said these things to me. I want to let you know, it did hurt me, but also I want to let you know it actually served, you know, my life. And I want to encourage you to start teaching about a growth mindset and not a fixed mindset or something like that, you know, or maybe

maybe don't approach them, but you realize I'm going to make sure that I don't do this to others, because maybe I did this to somebody and was hurtful, and I'm going to make sure I teach a growth mindset. I'm an encourager. I'm going to challenge people in a good way. So I probably miss some things or messed it up a little bit. My point is it's like that's sort of the, it's hard work. It is.

You have to think you've got to confront hard memories, but you have to go through the process if somebody wants to experience a breakthrough. Beautifully done, Josh. Well done. That was really excellent. So I'm just going to refine it a little bit and add a bit of detail. Let's go to the top there where you gathered awareness. So you, first of all, that you get the awareness of the thought of ADHD.

So think of the thought and then the detail of the memories. So in one thought, you could have hundreds, if not thousands of memories. Because memories are the data points, what was said, what was implied, what you experienced, the conversations, all the detail, and those are in the root. So the root part of, if you think of a tree, the root part is the source. So the word ADHD thrown out, or the very first statement that was made by a teacher, however many years ago, would have been the seed planted in the ground. and then every word after that experience was growing all the roots. And in that process through your unique identity, the tree trunk, you're being like how you uniquely thought felt and chose around those concepts

and that grew the branches. So in the gather awareness, what you are doing is you are basically getting, as you said, you are gathering awareness of that label made me feel X, Y and Z. It actually made me also respond. I had certain behaviors. So I'm just refining. So you described the feelings of frustration and so on. You described that it made you feel like you were useless, that you were or you weren't good enough or whatever.

That also affected your perspective on life that I'm just not one of the smart people. Can I do anything kind of thing? I'm just making stuff up. Maybe in your body is, I don't know what sensations you had in your body, but you would have. There could have been tension in your body, particularly over time. There may have been some ailments that were starting because of vulnerability to disease. So there's just the four areas. So as you gather awareness, you want to be quite.

specific about those four different signals. It'd be very deliberate and intentional, very organized. The mind-brain body network, the psychoreobiological networks, very organized and very detailed. Then that, as you quite correctly said, the next step is the reflect where it's the why, getting curious. How did this make me feel? What was this coming from? What did they say that? What are the details of those memories? So you're looking at the branches. You're getting some detail there around those four areas, the four signals and how they interconnected and looking at more detail of how they showed up in your life. And then you're capturing all of that.

And the system is correct, you use mind mapping, but it's actually more, it's called a metacog, metacog. And the metacog is a much more, a much bigger, expansive way with less rules of how you can actually just empty your mind-band body network. And when you do that, things will come up that you don't seem related in the moment, but there's some relation.

Because we have all these thoughts, like think of the trees, how they're under the ground, there's a lot of crossing over of roots under the ground. There's a lot of connection. If you think of a whole lot of forest of trees, and if you had to go into the ground, all of them are kind of growing over each other. So there's connection.

In other words, as you bring up the memories in that thought, you're going to activate connected memories in some way and how this has impacted other areas of your life. And then, as you quite correctly said, the action would be maybe to go discuss this with a teacher or maybe to apply it in your life as, sorry, the recheck, sorry, you're looking at everything you've written, sorry, you're going to look at all this detail and seeing if you can make some sense of the

patterns and how it happened and how it impacted you and what was truth, what was not truth, at two different versions, and then the action, what should I do? Should I discuss it? Should I actually make sure I don't do it to someone else? So now that wouldn't have happened in one neuropsychol. That would have happened over time. And so this is the big thing. When we're dealing with something that has locked us in like a label like ADHD, ADHD,

and I have a whole chapter in the new book on how to help your child. up their mental mess on labelling and these kinds of things, ADHD and the truth behind it and how to understand it, what words to use to help you understand it with your child and so on. But if we think about the timing, what I've shown in my research is that, and this is, there's not as much research out there on how long it takes to rewire the network. In other words, to break down a toxic pattern and rebuild a healthy new pattern into a habit. There's limited work. That's why I've done a lot of research in this area.

a handful of scientists that have done work in this area, which is crazy because we all talk about habits. One of the top best-selling books for years and years is James Clear Atomic Habits, and it's not even very scientific, but it just shows you how people are so aware things take time. So I've decided to do a lot of intensive work on how long does it take. And the research shows across myself and colleagues and people in the field that to rewire a network and to build a new habit that you can actually use in your life in a useful way, that you no longer held back by that label of what that teacher put on you, but have progress forward. That would have taken at least somewhere between 59 and 66 days per cycle.

You probably did multiple cycles. The mere fact that you've brought it up, and you may not have known you were doing those cycles. So it's around about nine weeks. So any kind of rehabilitation or something like addiction, and that's on the extreme end, to any kind of pattern that we've developed from bad habits you've developed from social media or eating habits or exercise, whatever, that we don't do or overdo it or, you know, all those different ways that we can distort things. Those aren't going to go away in 21 days or one neurop cycle.

It's going to take planned and guided, flying that plane and landing it daily foot cycles of 63 days. And the phases that I've worked out in the research and we've clinically and applied this, clinically and applied in the research is it's two-phased. First phase is 21 days, around about, and there you spend 15 to 45 minutes. second phase is around 42 days and that you spend about five minutes a day. So the second phase is shorter and but it's a stabilization phase and it's where people tend to fall down. People get really into the deconstruction, reconstruction, this is what it is, this is where I'm going to be, this is how I want to be and then they don't stabilize. So you've regrown the tree, but it's small.

It doesn't have enough energy yet and you've still got the old pattern that's now shrunk, but it's the tree, it's one tree, but you don't build another tree, but you've basically, through this process of neurocytling daily, at around about three weeks, the tree's got two equal parts. The one part's the toxic part. The other parts, the truth. And the roots also are half and half. So at any point, if I stop now, I could revert back.

And that's what happens so often in people working on stuff themselves or even in therapy or coaching or counseling. And you've seen this in your work trying to get people to change behaviors. So we can't change a behavior unless you've changed the mind behind the behavior. We've got to change the network. The behavior is just one of four signals. So we keep talking about behavior change. We need to talk about how a person shows up.

So therefore we need to get that tree. It mustn't be equal. We can't have equal part toxic and healthy. We have to shrink the toxic down to a point which is a teeny little branch and we have to grow the healthy. And that's what the second phase of five minutes a day of neuropsychling will do. is shrink the small part and grow the big part. So it stabilizes. And then that you can have big stuff.

You know, think of a scale of 1 to 10. 1, 2 and 3 on that scale are the day-to-day struggles, maybe a minor irritation with a loved one or irritating traffic or an irritating email or just feeling awful, you know, the day-to-day issues that we can get under control. They don't totally throw us off. The 4, 5, 6, and 7 are the habits that we've got into, the social media habits that have changed,

sort of changing our identity, which is on the seven side of the four, five, six, and seven, the bad eating habits, the bad exercise habits, that just being reactive and getting irritated about little things, bad patterns that we've developed that tend to be quite disruptive, and if you don't manage them, will affect our mental health. Then the eight, nines, and tens, those are the traumas. Traumas are things that have happened to us that we have no control over. The other ones, one through seven, those are things we've kind of done and reacted to and so on. things that we've been involved in creating in our own lives. The eight, nines and tens are your trauma, your physical, your trauma is like physical abuse,

sexual abuse, war, racism, you know, religious trauma is a big one in that side as well. There's a lot of stuff that's happened to you. And those create the deepest wounds, the strongest trees, the deepest roots. So they're not going to go away in one neuropsychol. So I've had some patients, for example, in clients and people that just know my work, that don't work with me personally, they've gone through multiple cycles of 63 days. So that's just to give you an idea of the time frame. And this may all sound very overwhelming.

How do you teach us to kids? So I have explained very simplistically how you can bring this down to a very simple level for children as young as three, as young as two and three years of age. You can start teaching these skills in a very, very simple way. I love this. Well, I want to encourage everybody to check out your book. I have a lot more questions. So we're going to keep going. But I want to encourage everybody check out Dr. Caroline's new book,

How to Help Your Childs, You See There, Clean Up Their Mental Mess. And this book, you can find it in bookstores nationwide. It's on Amazon.com. So you could go on there and check it out. But I've read several of Dr. Caroline's books. And this one is so good because it's hitting on something that's one of the greatest needs in the world today. You know, Dr. Caroline, I was reading a study here recently. And, well, this is more of a survey.

But they went and found the number one search term by Gen Z right now on Spotify is the word sad. So they're going up to listen to sad music. They're trying to look at sad songs, but also one of the biggest key terms that's continuing to grow is Generation Z. And some millennials, they tend to be, they're just very sad. They feel lonely. They feel isolated. Can you walk me through?

And there's probably some parents listening this. And they're like, yeah, I notice my kids, they're not as carefree. happy and exuberant as maybe I was as a kid or the kids I was around growing up. And not to say that, hey, all of us don't get sad at some point, but this has become more and more of an issue. Can you talk to me? Why do you believe today's kids are more sad than maybe previous generations? And what are some things parents can do about it? That's such a good question. In fact, they do a global survey every couple of years. It's like this massive survey that's done. And they look to look at the world's mental health

in general and they compare different nations and things and they look at adults and children and generally children are adults are sadder than children but in the last couple of years children it's flipped where children are sadder than adults which is very interesting is quite something a lot of it's got to do and i'm not blaming social media please i want to stress this because social media's been made out to be the big bad enemy we've got to be very careful because we are in an age of technology AI is real social media social media is part of our life internet's part of our life and it's a very good tool if it's managed properly. What has happened is that we're not teaching our children,

which comes right full circle back, and adults ourselves as well, back to the concept of mind management. How am I managing my mind in the moment? Am I able to, when I've been scrolling through social media or searching on Spotify for the word sad, and listen to hours of sad music and read, scroll through, or listen to TikToks on how sad people are?

And I've spent maybe six or seven hours doing that maybe, or three hours, 10 days a week for nine weeks, you've wired in a very sad network that's driving you. It's a consuming network that's driving you. Now, that's a deliberate and intentional move that you've made. But that network, the stronger it gets, it becomes almost like blinding. Look, I'm putting my hands across my face. It blocks your ability to see other stuff. And we, that's the messiness of what can happen when we are, I'm dealing with. consuming and not managing what we are looking at, what we're exposed to, and the impact that it's having on us. So to crack that, to start pulling that away so you can start seeing,

starts with creating this ability to be aware of the signals. Asking the, helping our children and ourselves, ask the questions that, hey, how many hours have I spent looking for that sad thing on Spotify? How many sad things have I listened to? How many hours? That is, how many days, how many weeks? That has created a network. That network is really, huge big network and that's driving me. How is it making me feel my body, my perspective, you know, why, how is it affecting my behaviours, how, and where's it going through the neuropsychol? When you do that, you can then become evaluative because we are instinctively as humans, we are brilliant, we have a wise mind at our core and when we tap into that,

and you'll see it with your little girl who's three, the wisdom that pops out of their mouth sometimes and the insight is sometimes blows your mind. I'm sure, Josh, that, you know, you'll say something or you might be a bit sad and they'll come up to you and touch your face and say, Daddy, why are you sad? And you'll say something and they'll give you something that is, like, why didn't I think of that? Children are incredibly insightful and wise. And that wisdom, and every human is wise. And when we get so caught up in these networks, we almost forget our wisdom. And if we, with our technology, it's so easy to live like that. Because the stimulation that has come from technology, which is a really brilliant thing.

Trust me, I really believe it's brilliant. It satisfies the network, but it's supposed to be managed. The network is not supposed to be bombarded all the time in an unfiltered way. We have to create filters. We have to know how to recognize when that I've observed or focused on is making me feel like this. And then I can bring in the door on my wise mind, see, oops, I'm building this network, do some deconstruction and reconstruction.

In that way, you can actually manage the process and you can get the benefits out of technology because change is inevitable. Technology is inevitable. When the radio was first invented, when TV was first invented, all the same cries that we're hearing now from, oh, this is so bad, happened then as well.

Every generation is going to face something. This is not the first pandemic and war that's been faced. This is just part of humanity. So what we are lacking in this generation in the last four generations is this, hey let's stand back and let's observe how life is affecting us on the scale of 1 to 10 and let's as a community come together and talk about this we've shoved that aside and we've said oh you said that's a symptom of a disease let's label you let's diagnose you instead of diagnosing we need to describe

and that's huge and we need a teacher we need to we need to enable our gen z and our gen alpha and our children that are battling with all the things that they're exposed to we need to help them to have the tools to say, you know what, mom, dad, whoever ever, uncle, aunt, this made me feel really uncomfortable. I need to talk to you about this. This made me feel like something's wrong. I don't know what's wrong. And we've got to create those safe spaces that they feel safe enough.

Don't do that. Don't put your cell phone down. Don't do this. Don't do these things. That's the whiteberry effect. You tell them not to do it, they're going to do it. You tell yourself not to do it. You're going to do it.

But if you say, okay, I give myself permission. I am messy. I'm doing this, let me see what it does when I do this and observe yourself and how you shift and change when you listen to the sad music. It's that shift that we need to bring back in that I'm trying to do with the work that I do. Well, you know, so much of this, Dr. Caroline, goes back to this it's a type of emotional intelligence. It's this self-awareness of self-distancing, right? Being able to step outside of oneself, sort of look at yourself, look at yourself almost like you're a friend or a kid and say, hey, this is, this is, you know, these are the actions that

best for you. We need to be able to do it with our kids. And you remind me of something, you use the word consume there. It's the same principle, you are what you eat. You are what you consume. And so when somebody's on social media or listening to songs on their device or whatever it might be, we should be feeding ourselves the cleanest, the healthiest, the most life-giving, you know, songs and stories and social media that there is. You know, I went through my own social media and I do this regularly and I go through and say, okay, who are the people I need to follow and what are the accounts I need to follow that are going to be iron sharpens iron for me? They're going to support my growth and my development of my body, mind, and my spirit. And who are the people

that don't do that? And not to say, I don't want to be aware of certain things like the news and what's going on in the world and have some form of negativity. Because sometimes, right, those things can help us grow our hearts and our compassion for others. But, you know, I go through and I say, okay, you know, people I'm following, you know, Dr. Caroline Leath, Andrew Huberman, John Maxwell, you know, these sort of people that I know are going to help me grow in body, mind, and spirit. And the others, if there's a level of self-comparison or negativity or something that I know that is going to create more toxicity in my mindset, you know, I'm eliminating those and getting rid of those. And I think with our kids, like I think about my daughter and Arwen, and she's still, she's three,

we still actually even explain this a little bit to her. As we have her on YouTube, you know, we have all the parental blocks on certain things at three years old, of course, and whatnot. But also it's like, like she was watching something the other day around, now listen,

some people may not agree with me on this and that's okay. But she was watching some things around Halloween and just a lot of kind of scary witches and things like that. And we said, Hey, we're not going to watch this one right now, you know, and just explained why.

I said, hey, we want to watch things that are funny and uplifting and positive and that, you know, are going to help you grow into a woman of God and things like that. So we spent time even explaining that to our daughter of here's why we watch this. Here's why we don't watch this. Here's another silly example. There's someone she likes to watch, and they're always throwing a fit.

Like the kid is like if, you know, they don't get their way. And we're like, well, she's going to, and by the way, we started watching this. It is, I mean, you know this already because you have kids, but it's unbelievable. Like she'll watch a kid on her iPad and they're throwing a fit. All of a sudden, she's throwing a fit. And we're like, well, she doesn't throw fits. Why is she doing that? They're like little sponges.

And we're all sponges. And so this is huge all the things you're sharing. Well, 95%, Josh, thanks for sharing that 95% of what is going into our network, we're not even aware of. So that conscious, deliberate stuff that I was telling you about is only around about 5% to 10%. So we're absorbing our environment. And really, I'm trying to make sense of it. So when the child sees that stuff, then they're not trying to be naughty. They're just trying to process.

So that wires into the brain, it creates very disruptive energy. So it's got to come out. So they don't know how to let it come out except by visualizing, by doing, showing up in the way that they just saw. So if they do that, it's not to discipline the child, is to actually say, okay, well, when you do that, that's, that's, those are the consequences. I understand that that's, you know, that you're showing up like this, that the words for a child will be, you know, let me show you, we've got a little character called,

this will be easier to understand. In the book, I've created a character called brainy, which is a, a cartoon. And the entire book, I teach the parent how to teach a child with a cartoon. So if you've got a two and three and a four year old, even the older kids, it's all all cartoon. It's written, but there's the little characters. I've created a character called Brainy. And Brainy is the superhero that walks your mental health journey with you. So parents can get the little toy. And Braney has a superpower called the Neuropsychle. We even have a coloring book with all different scenarios where Brainy and friends. So you can color the child can

you know, there's a little picture of this child, this brain is nervous about sounds and there's a blank page so you can do all your writing on that page. And we've got a whole series coming out. We've even got storybooks coming out with this brainy character. The idea of dear being that, let's say now that this is your child's starting the tantrum. So now you pick up brainy and you say, I see brain is very mad and brain is throwing things and brain is yelling and brain he wants to kick things. Why is brainy so upset? Why is brainy kicking? So you then labeled you'd go through the neuropsychal and, you know, in simple language.

explain exactly how to do it in the book and you use the doll to demonstrate I wonder what's wrong and then they immediately invites this immediately invites collaborative deep meaningful connection and they'll say well brain this brain and they'll probably say well they'll probably pick up brainy take it to the iPad and actually show the show that's how so you've given them a way of communicating and the best way to help your child with their mental health relating to this whole thing we've been talking today Josh is for you as an adult to manage your mental health People often ask me, what would I do? What would be the first thing that I would do in this mental health crisis? And my answer is, I would train the parents to understand how to manage yourself and to be authentic and honest.

And if you're having a bad day, you go sit down in a designated space in your house that you've created with your child or your children and that your neuropsychel or mind or whatever you want to call it area of your house. And you go, it's got a nice chair there and there's brainy and books and toys and a notepad that you can write in with art supplies. And you sit down and you say, oh, I had to do. such a bad day. I yelled at you. I'm so sorry. I'm so mad. And you go through the neurop you demonstrate to the point where when you're getting to recheck, you're by that stage, when you're writing on, let's say you're drawing pictures of like a cross face or something, the child peeking over your shoulder and they're pointing and they're saying, well, you know, and in the recheck, you invite them in to share that journey with you and they may give you or not

give you a statement, but you have then modeled for them, oh, okay, now I feel so much better and you're active. Let's go play with our puppy, and I'm going to phone my friend to upset me. So you've modeled the process. So for parents, I would say learn this yourself. I've got an app too. Neurocycle is in an app where I literally give you the therapy where there's the whole 63-day cycle, decompression activities, there's a little mini-neurcycles, and we've just built a parent ad on that's coming in in a couple of weeks, and that will actually go with the book where there's different scenarios. Like, for example, how to manage a tantrum in the shop using Neuicycle, how to deal with first-day fears of going back to school or daycare or whatever. So there's a multitude of different

scenarios where you can create this tool. But as a parent, you learn it for yourself because you've got issues. Everyone's a mess. We all need help. So by you managing yourself and then demonstrating obviously language appropriate and age appropriate, demonstrating how you managing your mind, you then teaching your child's skills of that, well, it's okay to be a mess. But you don't stay a mess. As you're a tantrum. Okay. It's a mess. But why? Let me manage that. There's a consequence. That's not the way I can manage, but I feel, I don't know how to explain how I feel.

So you're providing those mental skills to manage what they've been exposed to and what we've been exposed to. We've got to manage ourselves, and the kids will relate to that. That's so good. I love it. You know, one of the things I think as a parent that I've been more aware of is there's a level oftentimes, you know, and by the way, you've seen this discussion in these debates on probably Twitter and social media of, you know, there's a generation of everybody gets a trophy, right? Oh, yeah. What are your thoughts on sort of,

first of up, what are your thoughts on that, but also what are your thoughts on striking a balance between nurturing your kids, but also challenging them and pushing them in a healthy way to be their best? Well, that's a really great question. And what we want to do is teach, not competition, but enhancement.

So they are going to be people that do things better than you. And they get the, trophy you don't always have to get a trophy but you can celebrate their win and then winning the trophy because that's in that you're developing your intelligence your own intelligence so by celebrating other people you become healthier and more brain intelligent if you get a child the trophy all the time we're breeding narcissism we literally growing the behavior of narcissism into our children and entitlement and I did a whole this actually a whole reel that I've done in a podcast we have to in my podcast cleaning up the mental mess that you've been on and you need to come on it again

I've done a whole podcast on how we build, got to be careful of building entitlement and narcissism into our children through this trophy thing that everyone's a winner. Everyone is, but that's not how it works in life because you're a winner if you can celebrate someone else's success. That's winning. That's the correct version of winning versus you've got to also get the trophy. It's an empty trophy. You know, that person ran faster than you. Well, they got a higher grade.

Celebrate it. There's something that you can do that's going to come down the line. So we've got to teach our children not to be scared. of that. And we have. We've made the, I shouldn't say we because I don't do that, but that's, that philosophy has, it's breeding narcissism, it's breeding entitlement, it's breeding confusion, it's attacking identity. It's very unhealthy. That's so good. You know, you talk about, so, so, the neuropsycho is incredible, by the way. I'm so excited about this. I'm so excited to, you know, I practice this in a way, but I think you going through the exact process and being able to fine

to in the way that I already do this is going to be incredibly helpful. You know, what are some of the other, when you think about the best habits kids could have, so in terms of becoming more successful as just human beings, what are some of the most important habits that you think that we should think about, you know, having our kids do? So the first and most and foremost would be to let them understand this concept of mind and mind management and the tool of the the neuropsychles the tool that helps you do that now in the neuropsycho when you get to the active reach that's where you can start developing the habits that you want them to develop so for example if you are if there is a social media pattern that's

developed in your child that they're getting they're what to keep on getting stuck on certain social media patterns you can do a neuroping the impact and then your active reaches are what can you do instead so that's where you know you can build in you don't want to just say i must do this or you must do this without understanding why. So the neuropsychal takes you through, this is how I'm showing up, but I could show up in a better way. What could that better way be? And that's, you know, giving them the ownership, the empowerment to be curious and get the locus of control internal. So you initially co-regulate and then you teach them to self-regulate. That's really important. That's a really important process. And they can learn, all right, this is something that's happening in my life. I don't feel

comfortable with this. They won't use big words like that, but they recognize the discomfort and recognize, you know, why, but get curious about the discomfort in the emotions and so on, and work down to the, okay, this is what's going on, all right, what am I going to do about it? And that's the recheck, and then the active reach is then what am I going to do about it? So it could be, you know, I'm eating so much junk food and at school, and it's making me get lots of sore tummies and I don't concentrate so well. So active reach, how can I replace the junk food with something healthy? You know, so the actual actions would come into the active reach.

But until they've been curious and empowered to understand that internal locus of control, you can remove all the junk food you want, but you've got to teach them how to understand what it's doing to themselves. And that's in every situation. So that would be very critical in terms of really self-empowerment, internal locus of control, self-regulation, Those are, and you can use the neuropycle as your sort of framework for teaching them to do it very quickly. You could be in the car driving on holiday and your kids are having an argument in the back about a, some thing and it's getting heated.

And you can say to them, okay, well, let's just cool it now. Let's take a deep breath. Let's just see, okay, let's talk about how you're feeling, you're feeling like this. And this is what you're doing. You're yelling and you, you know, you're mad and you think this is like that. Your brother's stupid and your sister's dumb and this is just crazy. and you and so you label it for them and say right well why and then okay so now now let's pretend that you're looking at yourself through your iPhone camera and watch yourself now in the car

you tell them that you're directing them so okay now watch what you're doing watch yourself having this little argument immediately that's that ability to stand back and observe will this will start giving them a different perspective that's the third step but they may not have paper in the car so you you know you visualize and then say okay well so how are we going solve this. You don't agree with each other. That's okay. It's totally okay not to agree with each other, but it's not okay to hit each other in the call or say mean names to each other. You need to understand why don't we ask each other why you each have those different opinions and then accept that you are allowed to have different opinions about that movie or that song or that person

at school. And what are we going to, and then let the active reach would be, okay, let's each share our opinion and agree to disagree. You can do that in two minutes. You know, find minutes. You know, and that's a really good habit. You're teaching them how to be curious about everything that's going on and how they're reacting and what to do about it. So good. You know, I think one of the things that frustrated me so much when I was growing up as a kid, my parents were very concerned about who I spent time with. And looking back, I'm so grateful for that. But I would love to hear from you. Is there any research or science behind who we spent both kids and adults, how we might become more like those we surround ourselves with.

If somebody is stressed, we become more stressed. Is there any science or research behind that idea of, you know, the importance of peer groups or we become who we spend time with? Absolutely. So there's a lot. And in the fact, I mentioned earlier on about how 95% of our environment we are absorbing. So the people you hang out with, you're consciously absorbing their mannerisms, their behaviors and depending on the influence they have over you, if it's the mean group or the mean

girls, you maybe want to be like that and you shift all your functioning in that group because and you compromise because you want to be accepted. So that's conscious, that's happening on a conscious level, but on an unconscious level, there's this 95% going on or 90% of absorbing the culture around those people and the conversations and you're absorbing their messes because how they're showing up is because of their issues and how they showing up is because of the issues they are the people in their lives that they're exposed to. So all of it's this boomerang effect. So it doesn't mean we abandon people and shut people out of our lives, but we definitely do need to teach ourselves and our children how to look at the impact of people that are around us

that are impacting us and how they're impacting us. Is it compromising who you are as a person? In which case you need to maybe make some decisions for a time until they've sorted themselves out, you may need to pull away or you need to be confrontational and say look you know this and this is happening and that's what we've got to teach ourselves and our children how to do that you know an example I was listening to just happened to be listening to a podcast the other day about how the um that whole thing on the housewives um what's it called the housewives of orange county and and and you know what's it this it's been off from desperate housewives what's it's what's the title that show called again maybe I don't I don't watch a lot of it either so you and I are probably two of the

people that watch the least of this stuff in the world. So basically the idea was that it's a reality show. And I was listening to an analysis. It was basically a science show talking an analysis of what is happening in the mind and the brain when people watch these things. But the whole show is a reality show and how people shift, it's housewives that shift their lifestyle to be part of the mean group. And it's literally reflecting the mean groups that happen at school.

And how people's, the point making is our culture. that we put ourselves into is going to change how we function and compromise values in ourselves. So it is very important that we understand that those destructive people are showing up because they are being destructive by other people who are destructive. And so it becomes a point of you have to put your own oxygen mask on, confront a certain point and remove from that if necessary if that person isn't going, or persons aren't going to change. So yes, we do absorb.

we hang out with it becomes part of your networks. You literally wire that into networks and it'll become a driver if you don't catch yourself. I mean, it's so incredible because what you shared there is, are, you know, even mannerisms. I know when I've spent time around friends growing up, I just realized I start acting more like I did in the past or like them. And so we've all experienced this in different areas of our lives. But think about it. I mean, you start modeling the mindset, the behaviors, the thoughts, the actions, the actions. actions with it. I mean, this is really important for us and for our kids. You know, Dr. Caroline,

one of the things that I wanted to ask you, you give so much advice to so many people, right? I mean, daily, I mean, you're giving so much advice. What is the best piece of advice you've ever gotten in your life? It's, gosh, it's so, I've had so many good pieces of advice, but one of the things that has really stimulated my whole field and my whole life's work, which is nearly 40 years now was a statement made by one of my professors when I was, I think probably 20 years old at university, because he was my first degree. And he was saying that the brain cannot change. And that was the going philosophy in the 80s that your brain couldn't change. And I remember saying putting my hand up and saying, but we different life changes. We change. So if we are as humans

are changing, we use our brain, our brain must change. And he kind of sort of forwarded it off and kind of said, well, go do research. So I said, okay, what area? And he said, go and work with people that have had brain injuries, like traumatic brain injury. And he was, he was being facetious. He was basically saying it's pointers because if someone's got a damaged brain, there's no hope. That was what they were teaching us in this neuroscience lecture. And so I didn't, as a young student, I didn't, you know, think anything more except, oh, okay, I will go and do research on traumatic brain injury. And I started setting up my thesis for undergrad and for postgrad and that in that area and I did some of the first

neuroplasticity research in in my field and in the world at that time on showing that if you change a person's mind you change their brain we didn't even have the technology we had CT scans and QEGs weren't even around EEGs weren't even being used in the way they are now but we saw changes in people's we would look at more behavioral outcomes and I had people going from being literally non-functional at 18 years of age from a car accident not even functioning on a second grade level, going on to get university degrees. And that's when I knew something shifted. So it was his challenge to me that that challenge, the essence, was, you know what, the impossible,

you know, he's like almost brushing it off. He's just, you know, go and it's impossible to change something. That's the reality. The reality always changes. It was the fact that he challenged me that in a way that said things can't change. That caught me. Things always change. And that led to the research, but it was that challenge, that was a very, very good piece of advice that taught me that change is good, that I will change, that I can change who I am as a person, that as I learn more and become a better parent and know more, I may have completely different values to what I had 10 years ago, five years ago, and that's improved me as a person.

Change is an inevitable part of life, and that change affects the entire functioning of the human. So that was a great piece of advice because I pursued change and understanding change for the rest of my life. I mean, this is such a powerful message that you can change. You can be so much better. I mean, 10 years from now, you can be probably more than you even thought you ever could become. And so I think that's one of the messages for people is you can become somebody of greater character, greater skill, accomplished more than you ever thought possible. So what a powerful, empowering belief and message.

That really helped me because it also means, Josh, that you may change a philosophy. you may have a way of thinking that was so right for you at that stage and you see hey that actually wasn't good that actually and it was maybe not a bad thing but it changed how you viewed something and you can shift and that doesn't mean you fickle it means that you've grown so don't be scared to change who you are as a person you know that's really very key i think it's very key so good last last two questions for you one is you share a lot of information so this you know it could feel like a lot for a lot of people now i know because i've gone through the process once you get into it a little bit and you've done it one time in a second and the third,

it just becomes its nature to you. You kind of naturally know the process. But what advice do you have for any parents who might feel like a little overwhelmed? This is a lot. What is your advice for them? Get the app and do the app. Go through it because I walk you through it and get the book and put the two together because in the book I'm explaining it's so simplistically in an app you're experiencing it.

And teach yourself first. And as you teach yourself first, then you'll see how easy it is over time. Don't expect yourself to learn. It's like learning to play an musical instrument. It's going to take you time to get into the process with your children and getting to sort of a routine and stuff. But it doesn't take that long. There's a story in the book of, because I have a whole section on trauma and social identity and identity and social. There's a whole third section, all the major sort of issues that can hit sleep issues and that kind of thing.

And there's a story of a young boy who, observing his mom, he was very traumatized, sexual abuse and all kinds of things, but observing his stepmom, using the neuropal just to cope with the challenge of bringing this child up because he was so many issues from all the terrible trauma. He observed her and watched her change, and she sat with him and within a few days, four days of using the neuropsychil, this child slipped through the night. He'd never slept through the night before, and this child was eight years old. And that was this version, the adult version. So it will take you time to get all the concepts, but that's okay.

But the basic principles, you'll get into place fairly quickly. So this is a great combo to get. The coloring book and the toy are such good for young kids. The first book is 2 through 10. And then my other book, Link Up Your Mental Message, that you've interviewed me about before. That's Adolescence onwards. The app is for adolescents and adults.

And then we've got a parent add-on coming in that the parent can use to guide the child. and that'll be in the next couple of weeks. The coloring book and Brainy, these are available only on our website, Dr.leaf.com, and there is always a special going on. And so the app you can download iTunes, Google, and we have a web version. So that's where I would start. I think that's probably

the easiest place. So good. I want to encourage everybody, check out Dr. Caroline's new book, How to Help Your Child's Mental Mess, or how to help clean up their mental mess. It's on Amazon. It's in bookstores nationwide. Also, there's an app. There's a coloring book, all of these great tools. And this is such an important message because mental health is on the rise. And even if it's something you might not have grown up with

the kid, our kids today, they are dealing with it across all ages. And so the more we can help our kids improve their mental health, the more they're going to be successful in their relationships, which really impacts every area of your life. It impacts marriage, your work life, just success and everything, generally speaking. So I would encourage everybody run out and check out Dr. Caroline's new book. And Dr. Caroline, again, I'm just so grateful for you coming on and sharing your wisdom with us today. And I know we can find you on YouTube.

You've got a podcast. It's fantastic. I want to encourage everybody to check that out as well. But again, Dr. Caroline, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom today. Thank you, Josh. It was so great chatting with you again. And thank you for you for excellent questions. I think we got into some really good stuff.

Yep, agreed. Well, hey, everybody. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the Growth Lab podcast, where each and Every week we talk about how to grow yourself, your health, your wealth, and in your career and relationships. Thanks again to our special guest, Dr. Kara, Lion Leaf, talking about how to rewire your brain and improve the mental health for you and your kids.